Antonio Lasciac

I had less luck in Gorizia than in Cairo, where I became chief architect to the Khedive, the viceroy of Egypt. But on Rafut Hill you can admire the eclectic villa I built for my return home.

Dear visitor, I was an architect and engineer, trained at the Vienna Polytechnic, but also a poet, musician, and scholar of Italian history. I traveled extensively and worked in Rome and Naples, but especially abroad: in Constantinople and especially in Egypt, between Alexandria and Cairo, where I was awarded the title of "bey" and designed palaces, villas, banks, and public buildings. My projects for Gorizia were often rejected (like the master plan that redesigned it as a splendid "garden city"), but my ideas often influenced colleagues of the time. Nearby, in the square of the village of San Rocco, where I was born, I created a monumental obelisk fountain, and on the Rafut hill I built the Moorish-style house where I would have loved to return to enjoy the beautiful Gorizia climate, had war not come in 1914.